Public Games Matchmaking Clarification

Coop is still dead and matchmaking failures have a big share of the blame. Matchmaking is still incredibly restrictive.

1. Public games can only be joined at the start of any quest, instead of at the start of any check point, so players who don't want to lose progress or are not interested in the beginning of a quest for whatever reason are shut out.

2. Players will only join near the very beginning of a quest, in part because of (1), but even if you're only a few moments into a quest and have not yet triggered the next check point, progressing the quest seems to make the Matchmaking system ignore your game. Presumably this is because Blizzard had some unbelievable fear of people skipping a few seconds forward in their quest progression by joining your quest that is already 20 seconds advanced... So if your public game is not full in the first 30 seconds, you know it will not see anyone join until you finish the quest and start the next, which could be a very long time or even never depending on what you're doing.

4. Poor social support/battle.net 2.0 integration. Maybe if social features were not so poor, players would be more social.

5. The death of game lobby and game titles. There are thousands of different ways and reasons to play; someone being on the same quest check point as me does not guarantee we're doing the same thing at all. Without game titles, I cannot guarantee I will ever find a game where players are working on my objectives. This seems perfectly in line with the authoritarian (always online drm, "we define fun" game changes, ridiculously linear gameplay) development philosophy of this game, though... as if Blizzard refuses to admit there are different ways to play (only "our" way?) so there's no reason for this communication.

6. Even post damage-nerf, co-op has a vastly inferior rate of progression for public games. Presumably this balancing was due to Blizzard's fear that organized teams would blow through content, which doesn't seem so bad to me. In any event, this is terrible design and is the biggest reason co-op is dead and will stay dead. Not a match-making problem though.

Blizzard has the statistics of how many players are using Co-op games. Especially in Inferno, they had better be seriously troubled by those statistics, because everyone playing knows that co-op is dead. Matchmaking is largely to blame (at least for 1-5 above).

I wish we were hearing about developer concerns or solutions for these problems instead of promises that the matchmaking system is working and the displayed number changed due to a mechanical change.

Again i'm post this. Out of the millions and millions of pre-orders. How many are still active? How many people log on everyday? Give us those numbers please. =D

Undoubtedly, that is proprietary information that their competition could use to their own advantage so they won't give it up and asking for it is a relative certainty to be a waste of time. Your D3 license doesn't entitle you to demand to see their data mining on usage.

What isn't proprietary information is that there were dozens and dozens of threads consisting of hundreds of posts over the last few weeks using the public game numbers as some sort of proof of the game's death without any context on what those numbers meant, how they were calculated or anything else. That has now been explained. The over-reaction to this explanation on the part of many is appalling and yet another reason why anyone in their right mind should be amazed that anyone employed by Blizzard gives you the time of day much less answer your questions.

Yes, people are leaving the game. Big deal. It happens with new games, even popular ones. You think there were as many people playing Skyrim or any other AAA game you can name six weeks after release as on day one?

Given the community on the forums I can only hope that most of you who haven't already quit, do so soon and move on to more fruitful pursuits.

Then why does it clearly say "(number) players in public games?" It's not a clarification issue, it most clearly says, this is the number of players currently online and in (a) public game of some description. So...why does it clearly say something completely the opposite of what you just stated? I don't understand.

Keep in mind you have to mouseover the words "In Games" to see the meaning of it. Still it says In Games alreaddy, so there is not even a need for it so say (number) in public games.

The number of people in public games does not reflect number of people playing.There might not be 50k in public games, but have 1.5 million in solo games. So i dont see how everyone is using this as bases for how many people are acually playing ,or have left the game.

they should fix it, that u have a chance to get a good item from mobs.... and i dont mean an ilvl62/63 items that is worse than some lvl 45 items; i mean these should have good stats. on sunday i was farming act 1 and 2 on inferno for a long time, and didnt get a singel item that would have been equal to mine...wtf??? surely i got some ilvl 63 weapons with 150-200 dps....thats sad; and to improve my stats via auction house is impossible, because of the damn super hyper inflation in this game, thanks to damn gold farmers in china, so all items cost 10-20 mio and they would make my stats only 1-5% better. now i have a question, how shall i be able to play act 3??????

I dont think its the gold farmers posting items for 5 million gold, i think its the players farming act 1 and 2 inferno. i see to much in the forums and read to much in chat about players braging on making that kind of gold in the ah. so stop posting it 5 mill ,and maybe others will follow suite.

"There have been rumors that Diablo III's headcount has been shrinking...that in-game players are slowly and surely dropping out of the game and not coming back. First, Battle.net forum goers reported that public game counts seemed to be dwindling and that it was harder and harder to find a public game to join. Fans brushed it off.

After the forum rumors there were reports about Diablo III's player base diving based on a snapshot from Xfire, but most gamers didn't take the stats seriously since it was Xfire. After that, Xfire released official chart data based on rough data sampling and comparison statistics clearly showing that the player base was indeed dropping off rapidly. Fanatics continued to brush it off.

After forum goers raised suspicions about dwindling player numbers and Xfire released stats showing a decrease in player usage, a third source has jumped into the picture affirming that the player base is indeed dropping off fast.

Korea Times is reporting that research firm Gametrics has seen a massive drop-off from Diablo III's player base, with the game only occupying 13.39% of the usage at internet cafes, effectively moving Blizzard's game in third place behind Riot Games' League of Legends and NCSoft's Blade & Soul.

While 13.39% is still a very formidable number that many publishers wish they had, take into consideration that Gametrics originally recorded a massive 39.41% usage rate at internet cafes on May 24th, a week after the launch of Diablo III, which occurred on May 15th, according to This Is Game. The declivity of game usage and drop-off rate are almost identical to Xfire's stats.

Kim Min-kyu, a cultural content professor at Ajou University shared his views on the game's descent from the mountaintop after seeing the numerical decline, saying...“Diablo 3’s place is shaky,” .... “It is hard to believe that it was made by the people who created World of Warcraft and the StarCraft series. The poor content is really unexpected.” Simply put, both Gametrics and Xfire are both reporting close to a 65% drop-off rate of the player base from Diablo III. The exodus is apparently tangible enough that Blizzard made a statement about players' frustrations with replayability and end-game content, derailing the media buzz over allegedly wrongly banned Linux users who have neither received a detailed response regarding their bans nor a refund. Anyone who caught wind of that fiasco would probably want to steer clear of a game with such poor customer support, that's not including gamers who have and are losing money to the grey areas of the Real-Money Auction House.

Blizzard plans to remedy the rapidly declining user base with PvP and additional content planned to release in upcoming patches for the game.

These declining player numbers can't look good for the shareholders, especially with Korea's FTC still investigating Blizzard and internet cafe owners mounting a very real class-action lawsuit against the software giant.

I don't even know if an offline mode will save the game at this point. But hopefully this is a wakeup call for Blizzard to just focus on making a good game and leave all the anti-consumerist, pro-corporate bullcrap on the cutting room floor."

I've been playing Diablo 3 pretty heavily since it's been released, and I really thought it was good at first. But my incentive to play is getting so drained by the fact that my entire group of friends has abandoned the game.

It's gotten to the point where you start to feel like a chump for being the last idiot to leave this game. My sense of game community is almost all gone - so I doubt much can save this game for me, I'm very sad to say. I wanted to stick with it, but there isn't anything there anymore.

I've been playing Diablo 3 pretty heavily since it's been released, and I really thought it was good at first. But my incentive to play is getting so drained by the fact that my entire group of friends has abandoned the game.

It's gotten to the point where you start to feel like a chump for being the last idiot to leave this game. My sense of game community is almost all gone - so I doubt much can save this game for me, I'm very sad to say. I wanted to stick with it, but there isn't anything there anymore.

Plus... tbh, if I wanted to play AH Tycoon, I'd play WoW.

Hey Blizzard.....▲This is exactly whats going on...you can do whatever dmg controll you want, you can paint cowcrap purple and its still cowcrap, IMO the abomanation you call D3 is an insult to the "Diablo" name.Once again IMO, this game (D3) would have had a better reception if is was named something else and not called it a "Diablo" sequal.You can post that its a change in the way the #'s are shown, you can tell us the people are still there...but, they are not. Being a Diablo 1 & 2 veteran (hell I even played the sierra expac "hellfire") I'm VERY sad that this is what happened to "Diablo"That being said...I'm not going to delete my acct. in hopes that someday I can once again log into vent and tell my "ex-Diablo-gamer" friends "I told you it would be good!"

Undoubtedly, that is proprietary information that their competition could use to their own advantage so they won't give it up and asking for it is a relative certainty to be a waste of time. Your D3 license doesn't entitle you to demand to see their data mining on usage

What isn't proprietary information is that there were dozens and dozens of threads consisting of hundreds of posts over the last few weeks using the public game numbers as some sort of proof of the game's death without any context on what those numbers meant, how they were calculated or anything else. That has now been explained. The over-reaction to this explanation on the part of many is appalling and yet another reason why anyone in their right mind should be amazed that anyone employed by Blizzard gives you the time of day much less answer your question

lol the fact they posted this over any other issues is just sad. No one cares that much about how many people are in public games. Everyone solo plays anyway. Btw reason people are using that is because it says "Players in public games" not how many public games.

Yes, people are leaving the game. Big deal. It happens with new games, even popular ones. You think there were as many people playing Skyrim or any other AAA game you can name six weeks after release as on day one

Here is a few AAA titles that have many players still playing Battlefield 3/CoD Mw3/CoD Black Ops yeah all games lose player base but not as much as D3 has lost specialy with a record breaking pre-order and probably the biggest hype of any game. D2 still has over 18k people playing it even after 12yrs of it being around. That sadly and most likely won't happen for D3.

people laugh but for weeks I've seen people use the number to prove that no one is playing the game. thanks for the clarification blizz.

Even if you Quadruple the number of games being played, which assumes prior to patch 1.0.3 that there were ONLY 1 player games being played and now ONLY 4 player games are being played the ratio is something on the order of

20 - 40k games played prior to patch 1.0.31225(x4) 4,900 games being played (as of this post)

Wait, that number is supposed to be the number of public GAMES that are being played at that time? How come the description is labeled number of PLAYERS in public games then? The mouse over tooltip even states "XXXX players in games". Is this something that is just mislabeled?

our goal has always been to promote the four player cooperative experience in Diablo III.

If this is the case, could the incentive to play with other players be buffed? As it is, there is little incentive as mobs get more HP, MF is averaged among the team (only helps if you're the one with none), and drops do not increase at all. Instead of HP going up, increasing the number of mobs per group so more loot drops due to there being more mobs killed or keep the HP increase and have the quantity of loot scale with team size as well.

Look at the label under the blue name. COMMUNITY MANAGER. THE MANAGER OF THE COMMUNITY. meaning her job is probably to monitor what customers want and report it up. She is probably told what to write, and gives our feedback, she doesn't decide who fixes what, she just says what the majority of us say on the forums, then someone else decides whether or not to do something, and who ever is on the D3 team that is supposed to be hearing all this has probably heard it and is refusing to do anything, or is bringing it up to someone else , so on and so forth. these things dont just happen over night....